Antoni Tàpies, Complete Writings, Volume II

Description

In this insightful collection, one of Spain’s most influential artists, Antoni Tàpies, reflects on art, life, and politics. A companion to A Personal Memoir (2010), this volume includes essays published in Catalan in six separate books between 1970 and 1999 (The Practice of Art, Art against Aesthetic, Reality as Art, For a Modern and Progressive Art, The Value of Art, Art and Its Places) together with previously uncollected articles, lectures, and other texts. In these essays Tàpies reflects on the social role of art and the artist, discusses the influences on his art, and describes his political and artistic views.

Author Bio

Antoni Tàpies is a leading Spanish artist known for his heavily textured canvases of great expressive and communicative possibilities. His art is found in numerous international museums and collections.

Josep Miquel Sobrer is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University Bloomington. He is translator of A Broken Mirror by Mercè Rodoreda.

Serge Guilbaut is Professor of Fine Arts at the University of British Columbia and author of How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art.

Reviews

“In this insightful collection of essays, one of Spain’s most influential artists of the twentieth century reflects on art, life, and politics.”

“Tàpies has been on the cutting edge of international modernity for a long time, with sharp eyes, a vivid intellectual life, and witty political understanding. . . . The amount and quality of his writings show . . . how inspirational he has been, even if the modern world he described and aspired to was at times for some unrecognizable or unattainable.”
— from the introduction by Serge Guilbaut

“Tàpies's essays are of great importance in understanding his own work, but also in the broad philosophical questions he addresses. . . . His use of humble materials—clay, straw, simple objects—relates to [his] search for answers to universal questions.”
— Kathleen McNerney, coeditor of Visions and Revisions: Women's Narrative in Twentieth-Century Spain